Saturday, March 17

literacy

Interesting because I haven’t really given this stuff a lot of thought
beyond noticing the American not-so-crypto-fascist right’s obsession
with the idea that Phonics is Ordained from On High. I hang out with
teachers, so I’ve heard the conversation often enough, but I’ve been
operating under the impression that for most people who actually teach
reading there’s a false dichotomy at work in all the ideological
noise.

Liberman et al. say that there’s something real at stake, that “whole language”
instruction is a big factor in the way American schools presently teach
reading, and generally a Real Bad Idea, despite what the politics of the debate
would lead decent observers to guess. (Say what you will about logical
fallacies; there’s a pretty fair precedent for assuming that James Dobson is on
the wrong(est available) side of a given discussion.)

And then again, I hang out with folks in democratic ed. The working free
school teachers I’ve spent time with seem to have a fairly pragmatic,
do-what-works approach to the actual teaching of reading, but they’re also
deliberately laid-back about the timing of the thing. “They’ll read when
they’re ready, why force it?” seems to be the defining attitude.

other notes collected from paper

Self-deception is a higher order function.

I’ve been reading The Evolution of Useful Things, by one Henry
Petroski. The thesis seems to center on incremental change, context,
and (most importantly) failure. He had a ~500 page history of the
pencil on the shelf next to this one. I’m tempted. Judging by
Petroski’s cites, it looks like there’s a larger body of work on the
history of technology than I’d suspected.

Via David, José Ortega y Gasset: Humans have not a nature but a history.

Resignation Song: enjoy your illusion of freedom while you still have got it,
you poor son of a bitch.

On a bathroom wall in a Boulder coffee house:

The Laughing Goat:
real? no, just fancy.
more graffiti, please.

2 girls with interesting hair in Environment Colorado shirts iterate over the
passing crowd, take passing abuse. Two dudes busk by the door - guitar and
bongos. The guys a table over are talking poker.

Too much state, too many systems.

The lazy susan in the corner cupboard is, like so many things, a good
idea on paper. It’s like hierarchy in wiki software. In theory there
are practical benefits; in practice, it’s just bad. Bad bad bad. Fuck
the lazy susan. We should migrate to a tiered spice rack.